Blame Bush?

To the Editor:

Since 2009, President Barack Obama has established new peacetime records for spending. The Congressional Budget Office projections are that federal spending will not return to its 40-year average of 18.5 percent in any of the next 10 years.

Under their projections, spending will not go lower than 22.9 percent of GDP in any of the next 10 years, and federal debt will rise to 93.2 percent of GDP by 2022. Beyond the next 10 years, CBO projects spending to get worse. The aging of population and rising cost of health care would cause spending on the major health care programs and Social Security to grow from more than 10 percent of GDP today, to almost 16 percent of GDP 25 years from now.

Unable to hide the spending, Obama will say “it’s not that I’m spending too much, it’s that I’m taking in too little.” Obama will use the trick of “bait and switch” to hide a problem of borrow and spend. Nice try.

The problem isn’t the Bush tax cuts, since the CBO projects revenues of $2.456 trillion this year. It’s the third highest amount ever, surpassed only by 2007 and 2008, and would have funded all of the spending in 2004 with a budget surplus.

While we have been cutting back, Obama has been cutting loose, the purse strings that is. Obama has discovered that nothing spends so well as someone else’s money. It’s like spending an inheritance, a fortune and a future someone else earned.